


Via Crucis

by Calyps0



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Biblical parallels, F/M, Fix-It, Happy ending though, Sort Of, Stations of the Cross, Tros fix-it, angsty, tros
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 16:00:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22089775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Calyps0/pseuds/Calyps0
Summary: A reimagining of Ben's journey, set toward the end of TROS, through the narrative lens of the stations of the cross.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey
Comments: 20
Kudos: 34
Collections: Reylo Hidden Gems





	Via Crucis

Lightning strikes—sap-sweet—against ebony-charted sky. There is sweat stippled across his brow, above his lip, dripping dark against cold stone. She is alive beside him, in clothes white as a dove, and he has saved her alone, armed with only the life in his veins.

None of his ancestors have come. They were all sleeping, undisturbed, while he stood fighting, in agony. Crawled, back scraping against rock, felt his bones shatter and break. Could they not have stayed vigilant for him, in this one moment of need? Could they not have stayed awake?

But it is over. She is safe, and alive, and he has maintained just enough strength to hang on. The battered string of a heartbeat tethers him to this world; as does the dull warmth of her fingers against his.

The ride is a blur, rush of blood in his ears, stuttering like wings under his skin. When she takes him back to base they are both badly beaten, but life pulses through their veins, twin flames that refuse to bow out.

In the silent spaces, in those in-between moments, in those tomorrows and yesterdays, their wounds find mending, their bodies calm. She is beside him on and off, blinking at him hazily from sleep-dusted lashes, observing him wanly from doorways, lacing their fingers together with a faraway expression he cannot for the life of him parse.

Together, they heal.

But those moments are fleeting, flighty as birds. And soon tremors shake the galaxy—final ceasefires, surrenders, captures. It is mere days after the war has ended, the final fires still smoldering in smoke-sweet air, that the galaxy echoes round with cries for justice, for retribution, for revenge.

The first execution quakes through, fiery as kindling. The second only fans the flame.

By the third, there is no going back.

He understands this, somehow. For a galaxy steeped in violence, it is no surprise that there is a hunger for more.

So he is not surprised when there is a morning that feels different from all the rest, when her feelings are written more plainly on her face. This is how he knows that _this_ is the day he, too, stands trial. This is the day he learns his fate.

And what cruelty is this, that after finding freedom for the first time in three decades, his life is once again under the power of another, some force besides his own?

But when she guides him to stand, taking his elbow, he follows, and they spill as one into a wide chamber. A crowd is shouting. The ceiling is high, lit only by a skylight. Everything is shadow and noise, larger than himself.

He is led to a podium, is bade to stand. She moves to find a seat, but turns back for one shining moment. The kiss she bestows on him is sweet as rainwater, quick as lightning on his lips. When she pulls away, tears in her eyes, it feels like betrayal, and _yes,_ there they are, her friends, his mother, countless resistance members—they who will sentence him. He inhales a stuttery, shaking breath; it is all he is allowed before silence falls and a troupe of officers gathers before him.

Presiding over the trial is a tall, thin man whose name he does not know. He is unremarkable, save for tawny hair and an ironed, faded uniform. It looks soft around the cuffs and collar, and there is a place on the shoulder where it looks as if it has been mended, the fabric singed—an old blaster bolt wound, perhaps? He speaks in low, resounding tones, eyes icy with ire. His rumbling voice fades away. This base is large, and the air has an empty, hollow scent—no more a home than the velvet of black outside an airlock. The skylight strikes a stark swath of white against faces in the crowd, bleaching lashes and igniting irises in honey-colored halos.

The officer is still speaking, and his presence looms larger, as if he has taken a step closer, his careworn boots stepped military style, heel to toe.

His slap resounds in the chamber. It is only after the sound echoes, bouncing painfully off the walls, that Ben realizes he’s been struck. He hears a gasp to the left of him, but he can’t be sure to whom it belongs. His cheek smarts, but he doesn’t make a sound. 

When he lifts his head his mother does not meet his eye.

The remainder of the trial is a dark, technicolored blur. Voices and names, holos of events that pass as if in a dream, actions carried out by hands other than his own. He looks down at them, at his spider-pale palms, cuffed by a flash of silver, expecting instead to see the copper-rust of blood.

There is a beating bounce of silence. He looks up, surprised at the sudden elastic sound. Everything sharpens at once.

They lay down the sentence, which is capital, and what sounds like victory rings out in that bubbling chorus, that beat of footsteps on rising bleachers.

When the specifics are recited, he listens intently, because he cannot, cannot, _cannot_ look at the faces of those he loves. He can feel their eyes on him—Rey, his mother—with glances sharp and pricking at the nape of his neck. Memories look on, too, taking the faces of family, but he does not raise his head to acknowledge them. He listens to the officer, the palm print of whom still kisses along his cheek in warm flushed pink, as his pilgrimage is detailed:

First he travels, under heavy guard, through the planets he has sinned against. The salt-fields of Crait, the Jedi temple, the dozens of unsuspecting worlds where shrapnel from star-dusted battles had rained fire, wiping out homes and ripping families apart—all collateral from a useless war, a pointless war, a finished war. It would be easy to lose track, there are so many. But he does not, feels keenly each strike, each blow, each fall of soft skin against damp earth. They stay for a day at each spot, simply memorializing the points in time where strangers fell, where innocence bent and laid heads like streams of water, where lives had been blotted out, gone from one looping moment to the next. Instead of flowers he leaves teardrops at each one, falling droplets that pool on the ground—a trail like bitter rosebuds.

They stop at the supernova, the stream of stars that used to be the Hosnian system, and idle there in the silver night for days, watching the expanse that once pulsed with life. They do not let him sleep those hours in the star-dusted black, and he is grateful for it. Lives, each and every one, the loss of which he had felt resounding throughout the cosmos, haunt his waking moments. Their echoes would have been too much for his dreams to bear.

For this pilgrimage he carries only his saber—hollowed, but not hallowed—its crystal ripped out like a heart. The hilt is a jagged cross strapped to his back with a leather strap, a charcoal ‘ _x’_ between his shoulder blades—because the deaths that he felled on this blade were always his cross to bear. His sins are many, and they weigh on him like a physical burden, like a yoke spanning the breadth of his back.

They make him walk each path he had made before, each step he had taken as a previous version of himself. He does so silently, unwavering, even as they strike at his arms and back, even as they jeer and shout.

His guards are cruel. He lets them. He has been far crueler.

When he trips in a crater in that Jakku village, there is no one to help him up. He falls to his knees once, in the shifting sands, great dunes he has not spent a lifetime acclimating to. As he rises to his feet his saber beats a pulse against his spine.

The second time, a guard sweeps his legs out from underneath him as they overlook a shallow rock face, and he braces his arms against the fall. As he lies splayed on the rust-red ground, wind beating and sand-grains flitting around his ears, he stays there for a while, humbled, until he is yanked up roughly, a sharpness skating in the joint of his shoulder.

At last they reach the penultimate stop of their journey, just before arriving at the place of his execution. The cliffs are silent, the ocean calm. Sea spray is salt on his tongue.

This is the place where his uncle had fallen; this is the place where he had prayed for a different fate, for a fractureless family, for an unbroken boy.

He is surprised to find his mother standing there, looking wind-shaken, along with a squadron of resistance officers. Rey is here, too, dressed dolefully in gray. His gaze catches on the remaining attendants, picking out the doe-irised trooper, eyes flashing, standing warily behind the women. There is something strange about his presence that is lessening, traitor though that he is. His solemnity takes some of the strain off his back, eases weight that he hadn’t realized had pressed there. The saber that rests between his own shoulder blades had been at the trooper’s, too, once. It had nearly split him asunder.

He thinks he’s beginning to learn what that feels like.

His mother is crying silently, silvery tears that illuminate in the sunlight. It is a lovely day, bright and clear, and peaceful in a way that he has not lately taken the time to appreciate. But it is this that is too much to bear, his mother weeping, and it is to his knees again he falls, that third time, thud of bone against rock. After a long moment she steps forward to place her hands on his shoulders, tentative and warm. He presses his cheek to her stomach, his first home, the sharp line of his nose skimming her hipbone. They stay like that for a while, unmoving, until again he is pulled to his feet.

Rey stops the guards with a glancing gesture, and they allow her a moment with him as well. Unlike his mother she does not hesitate to touch him.

She grants him cool fingers on his brow, and his eyes close at the touch. He realizes belatedly that she is wiping away the dirt and soot on his face—remnants of his travels—revealing the clear, unblemished skin there. The dust and sweat gather at her fingertips, painting a picture of him across her skin.

The lack of a scar unnerves him, and sometimes he can almost feel its phantom heat slicing across his cheek.

It is in silence that they travel together to this last place, ships following in a line, like some strange preemptive funeral march. When they reach the place where he is set to die—Corellia, he realizes, with a jolt—he is clad in simple robes, earth-colored and worn. His feet are cut and scraped, having been made to discard his boots and gloves at the start of the journey. His hands are dry and cracked, the skin across his knuckles and wrists ripped open and bleeding from harsh winds and unforgiving restraints. 

An officer has won a bet for his helm. He does not wince as it is smashed to bits. The cape, too, is torn, split down the middle with a callous _ripping_ sound.

The planet’s scenery is oddly beautiful, and he finds himself lost in it; in the stories the buildings tell, he can piece together their war-torn past. An assembly is gathered when they arrive, in an open square, filled with a crowd of eyes glassy as ice. His mouth is dry as sand and he yearns for water, but he does not ask, does not open his mouth.

A guard holds his hand out, expectant, and it is with a lightness that surprises him that he finally relinquishes the saber, and with it, another segment of leaden weight.

Rey supplies the crystal from her pocket with shaking fingers. It is slipped carelessly inside, and the unlit hilt is pressed at his chest, right at his heart, by an officer with eyes like gray flint.

He closes his eyes when the ysalamiri is draped around his neck. Its pebbled foot tangles in his hair, a deadly crown. This is a failsafe, pointless though it may be. He has no intention of stopping this path.

There is a shift of fingers and the telltale _click_ of a button being pressed.

But the saber does not ignite.

†††

He thinks at first that he must be somehow unconsciously manipulating the plasma beam. The soft lizard stretching warmly against his neck must be broken. But when he extends the threads of his senses he finds that there is no force to grasp onto. He looks up at Rey, her tear-streaked face, but her expression is too honest, too open; standing as close as she was, her powers had been dampened, too. He can sense the tumult of her mind, though, like a stormy sea. Half of her wishes to leave this war behind her when this is all over, have someone manipulate her mind so she may forget every detail, every moment, every angle of his face.

The other half scares him even more: the half that wants to join him.

But the saber is still unlit. The officer jams the button on and off again.

The crowd looks on, and it is in this moment that time seems to _snap._ Everything refocuses, shifts into realignment. Blood is spattered in memory, skating across history, across time, pooling and blooming like blossoms across palms.

The crowd slowly gets to their feet. It is like a wave, foamy and serene, swallowing shorelines.

 _No more,_ their feet are saying, as they rumble like thunder. _No more_ echoes, again, again, again.

†††

When the street is nearly empty, he stands, still unbroken, and he is miles and years from that red light, from that plasma crucifix.

Perhaps the crystal was too cracked. Perhaps it became permanently inert when it was pulled out of its casing. Perhaps the officer simply placed it into the hilt incorrectly.

But—and this is a theory that he fears and reveres in equal measure—perhaps it was some other force entirely, the will of a being higher than his own. Perhaps those close to his heart had not been sleeping after all.

 _Thank you,_ he breathes—to the air, to the ether, to nothing itself. _Thank you for not forsaking me._

And in that place beyond the boulder-studded street, past gardens flecked with blood where a prince’s crown might sooner become thorny talons across his scalp, the sun sets, painting the sky midnight black. It is as a knight he falls, the last victim of a silent battlefield. It is as a Jedi his power fades from his fingertips, sighing, _no more. No longer._ It is as a son he is studded in stars. And from those charcoal ashes—the third of his line, the end of three generations, that third dawning day—it is as Ben Solo he rises.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! If you liked this, let me know! <3


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